Allegations of bullying of Jonathan Martin by his Miami Dolphins team-mate
Richie Incognito shine a light on the more sinister elements of sporting
life

It is an article of faith among gridiron’s beat reporters that locker room access represents an enviable liberty, when in reality the average 21-stone linebacker with his wild up is seldom disposed to offer the most polished post-game quote.

This week, though, the changing quarters of National Football League teams have been recast as a nightmarish netherworld, home to antics beyond the pale in most college fraternity houses and where a façade of crass machismo conceals the more sinister cult of ‘hazing’.

The saga convulsing the Miami Dolphins lays bare these darker undercurrents. Richie Incognito, with a name perhaps to exclude any calling as a CIA operative, stands accused of baiting team-mate Jonathan Martin with a stream of poison that reportedly escalated to include racist voicemails and threatening texts.

The character contrast is starkly drawn: Incognito the hardened veteran of the offensive line, with a propensity for foul play and coarse behaviour, and Martin the former Stanford classics student who allegedly smashed his tray in anguish in the team cafeteria after other players deliberately stood up to leave as he arrived.

While the incident might sound like a sub-plot straight out of Sweet Valley High, its repercussions are spreading fast. Martin has gone to ground, the Dolphins are in denial, and Incognito has had his cover emphatically blown by a welter of US network coverage dragging his reputation through the gutter.

But ‘Canteen-gate’ in Miami has aroused concerns that the NFL, long inclined to cast a jaundiced eye towards trash-talking behind closed doors, could harbour a problem of institutional bullying — or hazing, to adopt the American term for ritual humiliation.

“I’m in charge of the workplace atmosphere,” declared Joe Philbin, the head coach, who has suspended Incognito. “And if the review shows that this is not a safe atmosphere, I will take whatever steps necessary to make sure that it is.”

All indications are that the Dolphins environment had long since grown intolerable for Martin, a 22-stone left tackle drafted last year. As a rookie, he had been conscious of the traditional smorgasbord of indignities served out to NFL neophytes — which could encompass carrying the older players’ equipment off the field, being taped to the goalposts, or in his case, according to one report, being forced to pay £10,000 for a Las Vegas party that he did not even attend.

The allegation is that life was made grimmer still by Incognito, the left guard from whom Martin would be separated by mere inches in the Miami offence. This unreconstructed New Jersey native, voted the league’s dirtiest player in 2009, swiftly branded Martin ‘The Big Weirdo’.

“Big Weirdo barely fits in a go-kart” was one of his few printable offerings on social media. Just before the scandal broke, he had written portentously in the Dolphins’ Halloween programme of Martin being “the easiest team-mate to scare”.

Swiftly, the debate has polarised into two distinct schools of thought. The more simpatico version is expressed most powerfully by Lawrence Jackson, the uncompromising ex-Seattle defensive end who says of Incognito: “I have always hated him. Just for perspective, he is the guy who makes you want to spit in his face.”

Under this logic, Martin is portrayed unambiguously as the victim of a jock culture that has spun out of control.

But as difficult as it might be to muster goodwill for Incognito, with a 10-year history of misdemeanours dating back to an assault conviction at the University of Nebraska, Martin is not immune from criticism, either In a sport so wedded to its self-styled tough-guy image, there is widely perceived to be greater honour in dressing-room secrecy than in crying to one’s coaches, and in certain eyes the younger man has violated the code.

Terrance Knighton of the Denver Broncos believes that “when it is player-to-player, it can be handled as players”. ‘Man up’ is the inescapable subtext. Fifteen years ago the rookie initiation was so gruelling that the New Orleans Saints’ latest intake would have to run down dormitory corridors and be hit with coins. Martin, by his extreme response to provocation, is deemed to have failed the test.

On more sober analysis, this is a case too serious to be swept aside so blithely. The charges against Incognito amount not so much to hazing as to sustained harassment that turned the workplace for Martin into a realm of acute misery.

The perpetrator’s rap sheet, which includes being ejected by St Louis after he butted two opponents, is likewise too lengthy to be ignored. Martin has emerged in the evidence to date less as a delicate wallflower than as a man pushed past breaking point.

The NFL would do well to ensure that future offenders no longer remain, shall we say, incognito.